Arguably the greatest shock on election night had nothing to do with the results and everything to do with what one person in particular pledged to do about them. Donald Trump said he was “absolutely willing” to accept the vote totals. In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, he even pitched in on his party’s postmortem, saying voters didn’t like the war, didn’t like the gas prices, and maybe found his deportation policies too tough. That’s … actually a pretty good diagnosis.
But it didn’t survive the weekend. On Monday, Trump discovered the real culprit, as NBC News reports:
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote,” he wrote on Truth Social, implying there was something nefarious about elections carried out under different processes in different states. “It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!” the post concluded, without elaborating. Election officials nationwide have reported that voting this year was largely routine. ... His stance seemed to start to shift Saturday, after he replaced longtime chief of staff Susie Wiles with MAGA favorite Stephen Miller.
There’s something more than a little pathetic about a president who, a week after a defeat this size, can’t decide whether he lost because of the war and gas prices or because of the voting machines. As for “How could the Polls be so wrong???”: they were wrong, just not the way he means. The Pew Research Center found that the polls underestimated Democrats’ margins, and those were the same polls Trump spent the summer dismissing as “Fake.” It takes a special kind of genius to publicly rail about the polls that turned out to be too kind to your own side.
Kate Starbird, a University of Washington researcher who tracks election rumors, calls the post “a trial balloon.” Trump is checking whether his audience likes it. The last time Trump floated one, it ended with a mob at the Capitol.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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